information aesthetics

Venngage: And Yet Another Online Infographics Editor

Tue, 15 May 2012 22:11:48 +0100

After 2 very similar posts in a very small timeframe, featuring Easel.ly and infogr.am respectively, I seem not to be able to follow the 'automatic infographics editing' scene fast enough.

Automatic resume infographics creator visualize.me has just launched Venngage [venngage.com], which aims to empower people to create beautiful infographics in minutes, so that "creating infographics [becomes] as easy as creating a Powerpoint presentation".

As a unique feature, Venngage's visual elements are displayed as pure HTML elements, which should positively influence SEO stats, page ranks and back links.

As with infogr.am, venngage is able to directly link custom data values to data-driven graphs, but offers more visualization techniques that go beyond the traditional pie chart, line graph and bar chart, and includes sophisticated techniques such as treemaps, bubble charts, word clouds, and the like. As with the other services, venngage offers the ability to combine a specific visual style with a range of configurable visualization techniques, along various editing features that range from color choices, labels and font types.

The resulting infographic can be embedded (see rough example below), downloaded as an image, or linked to.

infogr.am: Another Online Editor of Interactive Infographics

Tue, 15 May 2012 21:28:35 +0100

A few days ago, we posted the website Easel.ly, a new web-based service that aims to empower lay users to design infographic-like illustrations within the browser. Unfortunately, Easel.ly seems more apt in combining infographic-like images on a canvas, than to link real numerical data to a graphical form.

So here comes Infogr.am [infogr.am], another competitor towards semi-automatic, web-based infographics editing. Developed by a start-up based in Riga (Latvia), though now based in London, the online service offers a collection of infographic themes as well as different interactive chart types (e.g. bar graph, line chart, pie chart, matrix chart, and so on). Note that next to the basic visual style, they also offer some more 'humorist' approaches (such mapping the tongue of a frog as a horizontal bar). Users, which should include journalists, bloggers, data professionals, education, financial experts and designers, can then customize their infographic by adding multiple charts underneath each other, and configure them with their own personal data.

User-generated charts can then be embedded in third-party websites (see example below) or be linked to by dedicated URLs.

So will there be a time where all infographics will look really alike?

The Historical Evolution of Europe's Borders

Tue, 15 May 2012 20:36:05 +0100

The movie "Epic time-lapse map of Europe" fast forwards a map from the year 1000 AD until 2003 to reveal the dynamic nature of Europe's borders, alliances, unions, territories, and occupied lands.

An alternative movie takes a bit longer, but contains useful textual annotations such as the actual year that is shown and the events that occurred.

The movie was made with "Centennia Historical Atlas" by Centennia Software.

Watch the movies below.

Via @tillnm.

FatFonts: New Font Links Value of a Number to Amount of Pixels Shown

Fri, 11 May 2012 14:47:29 +0100

FatFonts [fatfonts.org] is a novel numeric typeface for data visualization purposes. The design of FatFonts is based on Arabic numerals, but the amount of ink (i.e. dark pixels) used for each digit is proportional to its quantitative value. This font enables the reading of numerical data while still preserving an overall visual context.

The typeface was developed by Miguel Nacenta, Uta Hinrichs and Sheelagh Carpendale at the University of Calgary. In the online gallery several case studies are documented on how this font can be used for good used. More detailed information about these examples can be found in their academic paper (PDF), while more interactive examples can be viewed here.

The fonts themselves can be downloaded here.

Via @eagereyes.

Easel.ly Debutes Online Editor of Infographics

Thu, 10 May 2012 20:02:33 +0100

San Diego-based start-up Easel.ly [easel.ly] is offering a beta service that allows lay people to design and implement their own "infographics" via an online editor. The user-based customization of infographics seems to be the next phase after the automatic generation of infographics, and has already been promised by community websites like visual.ly.

For now, easel.ly allows users to drag and drop predefined and uploaded vector images on pre-designed canvases and themes for easy creation and customization of infographics. According to the founders Patrick Alcoke and Neil Harris, all themes have been designed by graphic designers to ensure the highest quality for their users to start with.

The service is currently still in beta and thus free. The editor also resembles more an online vector shape canvas with a library of flashy infographic imagery, than a workable tool that makes the mapping of numerical values to believable shapes more efficient or compelling. Yet, we'll need to see what the future brings.

The Iranian Internet Repression Expressed in Infographics

Wed, 09 May 2012 22:15:13 +0100

The series of infographics titled "The Iranian Internet" [this-is-maral.com] by master student Maral Pourkazemi combines an aesthetic sense of (greyscale) infographics with the serious topic of international politics.

Maral designed six different content panels that each explain a distinct theme, such as Iran's general Internet usage, their concept of a "Halal" or "national" Internet, how Iranian users can escape this "Halal" Internet, which Iranian blogs are filtered, how the cyber repression operates, and how this is initiated by the paradox system of government.

More detailed information is available here (German).

List of Hand-Picked and Recommended Data Visualization Tools

Mon, 07 May 2012 21:20:35 +0100

The following post seems particularly useful for people that are relatively new in the field of data visualization and might consider developing their own graphs or interactive applications. Should you program or not? What tools should currently exist? What visualization frameworks are available?

The good people of the Swiss website called datavisualisation present "A Carefully Selected List of Recommended Tools" [datavisualization.ch], containing a set of hand-picked software libraries, applications and services that they use regularly for their own infovis work. The current collection contains three different categories: libraries for plotting data on maps, frameworks for creating charts, graphs and diagrams and tools to simplify the handling of data, and will be updated regularly. A filter in the right top corner allows to exclude those tools that require programming expertise.

More detailed information is available here.

C&A Fashion Like: Real-Time Facebook 'Likes' Shown on Clothing Racks

Mon, 07 May 2012 20:17:38 +0100

The Brazilian arm of international fashion retailer C&A has launched a custom-made clothes rack [facebook.com] that shows in real-time how many Facebook "Likes" a particular clothing item received on Facebook. Accordingly, customers present in the physical store can better estimate how popular a specific clothing item is perceived by the masses through the smart use of social media crowdsourcing.

In practice, the project blends the border between the virtual and the physical by counting the "Likes" on small digital displays that are integrated in the clothing hangers. Now one should only avoid to indadvertedly swap the fashion pieces around, of course.

Via @vizify and The Verge.

Müsli Ingredient Network: How Germans like to Eat their Breakfast

Wed, 02 May 2012 20:35:57 +0100

Müsli Ingredient Network [stefaner.eu] is a graphic meant for the print medium that shows how the customers of the German start-up MyMuesli tend to combine different müsli ingredients together.

Although one of the smaller projects designed by "truth and beauty operator" Moritz Stefaner, it still offers a small set of information graphics, such as a straight-forward radial network visualization, in which the ingredients are grouped by category, such as base mueslis, fruit, nuts, sweets, and so on. An additional "surprise factor" matrix visualization provides a more helpful view in revealing the links between the ingredients. Here, the circles represent link strengths between pairs of ingredients, while the saturation and darkness of a circle indicates the "unexpectedness" of that respective link strength.

Some of the insights discovered include how fruit is the most popular ingredient, and how different fruits are often combined with each other. Sweets and nuts, however, are rarely combined. Most people pick not more than a single sweet ingredient, while the link between pineapple and papaya seems stronger correlated than pineapple and mango.

High Resolution Movie Reveals the Infrastructure of Humans on Earth

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:51:03 +0100

The following movie amazes for its beautiful and high-definition rendition of the presence of human presence on the scale of a whole planet.

The movie "Welcome to the Anthropocene" [vimeo.com] developed by global education organization Globaia reveals the start of a new geological era dominated by humans, by visualizing its main infrastructure, such as cities, roads, railways, transmissions lines and underwater cables.

Those who are interested in static maps rather than an animated movie of the Earth, can check out the according collection here.

The film is part of an educational webportal on the Anthropocene, commissioned by the Planet Under Pressure conference, and developed and sponsored by Anthropocene.

US Senate Agreement Groups: How US Senators Have Agreed over Time

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:12:29 +0100

The interactive flow graph Agreement Groups in the United States Senate [friggeri.net] by French PhD student Adrien Friggeri reveals how US senators have agreed (or disagreed) over time.

All historical US Senators were subdivided in overlapping groups of agreement using a custom-made community detection algorithm called C3, which was specifically designed to detect maximally cohesive groups in a network. Here, I guess the network was created from recognizing how people voted for specific bills.

Each row in the vertical graph represents one unique session of the Congress. Senators are represented by paths (i.e. Democrats, Republicans, Independents) which are grouped in gray boxes when they are part of the same agreement group. Since a person might be part of several groups during a same Congress, some of the paths have branches towards both the groups the Senator belongs to.

Although the algorithm was able to consistently discover two distinct groups, it still sometimes arrived at 'wrong' results (e.g. placing a Democrat in the Republican group or vice versa).

Thnkx Adam!

Movement in Manhattan: Mapping the Speed and Direction of Twitter Users

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 19:25:51 +0100

Inspired by the animated wind map that was posted a little while ago, professional programmer Jeff Clark has explored how people move about in a city. The result, titled Movement in Manhattan [neoformix.com], visualizes the speed and direction of Twitter users in Manhattan, New York.

The visualization is based on a large collection of geo-located tweets that were sent in a 4-hour time-window by the same users. These tweets were used as samples that together construct a vector field representing the average flow of people within a specific area. Particles, representing people, were released at locations where actual tweets were recorded and their subsequent movement was determined by the flow field.

The lines are thus traces of these moving particles, which start out blue and gradually change to red to show the direction of movement.Locations where there is little movement will have blue dots or very short blue traces. Longer traces with more red show a greater speed at that point.

City Dashboard: Aggregating All Spatial Data for Cities in the UK

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:52:06 +0100

CityDashboard [citydashboard.org] aggregates various spatial data of about 8 different cities around the UK, and displays this data on a dashboard and a map.

Developed by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis of the University College London, it exemplifies one of the dreams of the smart city movement: to provide a single, open overview of almost all available data streams that a modern city of today creates.

The current prototype shows data on temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed, river level, rain, air quality, mood, number of public rent bikes available, air quality, geiger counter, public Transport status, Twitter trends, traffic cameras, news and OpenStreetMaps updates. The 'Map' view also reveals the current messages that appear on the road information screens.

More urban data visualizations from this research group can be explored here.

Via @albertocairo.

Color Forecast: What Colors are People Wearing in the Street Today?

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:15:19 +0100

Color Forecast [pimkiecolorforecast.com] shows what colors people are currently wearing in three European 'fashion capitals', which are Paris, Milan and Antwerp. Naturally, this viral campaign for European fashion brand Pimkie also includes according fashion recommendations and various standard stack bar graphs and pie charts for those people who are more interested in data than in fashionable colors.

The colors are captured through a set of high definition cameras installed in each city, which are connected to Mac Mini's running some custom-made color tracking software. The software analyzes the colors, and shows in real time which ones are worn the most. More information about this process is available below.

Representing the First 4,000,000 Decimals of Pi in a Single Image

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:06:21 +0100

The online visualization titled "3.1415926535897932384626..." [two-n.com] by design studio TWO-N represents the first 4,000,000 decimals of the number Pi within a single image.

Each unique digit of Pi corresponds to a specific color, and is rendered as a 1x1 pixel dot. The result is a long, random-looking pixel carpet image. Next to a dedicated slider that allows up/down scrolling through the resulting image, one can also search for the first occurrences of any specific decimal combination.

See also DNA Rainbow, which created similar pixel-based images by mapping the 4 base molecules of DNA to pixels in the colors red, green, blue and white.

Via @martinouellette.